U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/953,356, incorporated herein as if set forth in full herein, discloses a frame-based architecture for allocating channels to access points (APs) in a wireless, local area network (WLAN) when there are a limited number of available channels, taken into account the interference pattern between APs.
Practically speaking, except for very small WLANs (i.e. those with only a few APs) the solutions presented in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/953,356 may require a long period of time to compute the actual channel allocations.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/953,356, filed concurrently with the present application, discloses one solution to this computation time period problem by approximating optimal channel allocations for WLANs using a so-called Greedy Heuristic technique.
While this technique is effective, it is believed that other techniques can also be used to approximate optimal channel allocations within a reasonable time period.
Further, it is believed that these other techniques may compute closer approximations to optimal channel allocations.
It is, therefore, desirable to provide alternative techniques to compute closer approximations of optimal channel allocations for WLANs within a reasonable time period.